The majority of funding support for this project at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Halle-Saale, was provided by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)-Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Services (CSREES), National Research Initiative (NRI) for Plant Biosecurity. Thank you for your support.

We have also to thank two major industrial companies, Bayer CropScience, Germany, and Syngenta, Switzerland, for financial support and their help getting important thrips species from all over the world. We got further important species from the thrips collection of the Senckenberg-Institute (Dr. Richard zur Strassen), Frankfurt am Main, and from the national thrips collection of the German Entomological Institute, Müncheberg (Prof. H. Dathe).

We thank the following individuals for their endorsement of this project at it’s inception: Richard Bostock Ph.D. Professor and Department Chair Director WPDN at UC Davis; Diane Ullman Ph.D., Professor of Entomology and Associate Dean in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences at UC Davis; Michael E. Schauff Ph.D., Research Leader Systematic Entomology Laboratory, USDA;  Umesh Kodira Ph.D., Chief Plant Pest Diagnostics Center California Department of Food and Agriculture, and Ray Gill (retired) Plant Pest Diagnostics Center California Department of Food and Agriculture.

We thank Dr. Diane Ullman at UC Davis for allowing us unlimited access to her molecular laboratory. We thank the following laboratory technicians for their molecular performance and success in completing the molecular goals and the important microscopic slides for this project: Diane Wille, Renate Kranz, Angelika Steller, Christina Peace, and Zolene Quindoy. In addition, we are thankful for the numerous round table discussions with Lisa Chanbusarakum, Judy Hyle, Sandra Kumm, Ingeborg Schuetz and Gunther Tschuch in helping us tease apart molecular anomalies that we encountered throughout the project.

Finally, special thanks to the director of the CBIT (Centre of Biological Information Technologies, Brisbane, Australia), Matt Taylor and his Lucid team for help and support during this project.